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This short film takes us to Horn, a town in Lower Austria where Ulrich Seidl grew up. For years it has been a tradition that high school students organize the graduation prom. This isn’t only one of the town’s most important social events, but also the culmination of Carnival. Ulrich Seidl: “The Prom was the reason I was kicked out of the Film Academy. The teachers didn’t like its structure or editing, and thought that the film would hurt the Academy’s reputation.”Read More »
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The subject is a 50-year-old dwarf who stopped growing at 1 meter 40. He is fat and plays the piano strangely but the point Seidl makes is that he is like others, and you should judge him according to the same criteria you would judge them.Read More »
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Seidl takes his camera to an abstract-art exhibition and asks the public to comment on what they see. Some analyse the work from a strictly Freudian angle as they nibble their canapés; others can only see penises. In reality, the paintings are simply an excuse for Seidl to unmask the anguishes, fears, suspicions and sexual taboos of gathered together there.Read More »
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Whether in the countryside or on the edge of the city, amusement parks or fun fairs are hot across Europe. Their names, amusement parks and fun fairs, say it all: People want to be amused, they want to have fun. For example, at the Europark in southern Germany a dummy with a contorted face sits in an electric chair. Smoke comes out of him and a light flickers off and on from out of the roasted “brain” of the dummy, which shudders and cries in pain. A film on the culture of amusement in today’s “leisure” society.Read More »
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The Last Real Men (Die letzten Männer) is an hour-long piece following the Viennese teacher Karl S. on his search for a wife who doesn’t question traditional gender roles and “doesn’t talk back”. In so doing, Seidl probes the motives that make Austrian men look for wives in Thailand and the Philippines.Read More »
A 1997 TV film. Two descriptions:
“Main character of this movie is Rene Rupnik, a former math teacher. He is forty years old and lives together with his mother in a desolate block of flats. Ever since his early youth women with big breasts have fascinated him, because they symbolise a kind of earth mother to him. He has never had an especially close relationship with his own mother; she was too ‘bony’ for him. Object of Rene’s fantasy is the actress Senta Berger, to him everything a woman should be. Standing by the blackboard and explaining the mathematical laws of sine and cosine (‘sinus’ is bosom in Latin), Rene sings the praises of the female curves and those of Santa Berger in particular. Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl let the former teacher speak freely about his obsessions and desires, intercutting his monologues with scenes from the protagonist’s day-to-day life.”Read More »
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Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory prestigious music school in Vienna. In her early forties and single, she lives with her overprotective and controlling mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency, where there is no room for men. Her sex life consists of voyeurism and masochistic self-injury. Lonely and alienated, Erika finds solace by visiting sex shops and experimenting with masochism. Ata a recital, she befriends Walter, a handsome young man, whom she seduces and with whom she begins an illicit affair. As Erika slowly drifts closer to the brink of emotional disorder, she uses the love-stricken Walter to explore her darkest sado-masochistic fantasies, which eventually lead to her undoing.Read More »
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Three members of a middle-class family are followed as their lifestyle slowly disintegrates. Nothing spectacular happens: it’s just the dreary un-ending grind of a go-nowhere existence. The film’s final scene emulates Fassbinder, as the threesome bid auf wiedersehn to everyone and everything in a gaudy, grotesque manner. It goes without saying that Der 7. Kontinent is not for everyone’s taste.Read More »
Synopsis
A motor-sports spectacle that kicks up plenty of dust. On the trail of the 2007 Dakar Rallye ‘7915 KM’ undertakes a search, along the way encountering the variety to be found in Africa’s present in Morocco, Sahrawi Republic, Mauritania, Mali and Senegal. ‘7915 KM’ demonstrates the extent of this distance, which is the result of political and economic conditions, and also the ideas and prejudices to be found in both Europe and Africa. It also makes the closeness tangible, which becomes clear in the stories of everyday life, work, hopes and worries. Keeping the sobering reality in mind, it creates an homage to humanity and slowness which questions deep-seated perceptions and the role of Europeans in numerous, presumably African, problemsRead More »